CHICAGO, Nov. 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Cision (NYSE: CISN) today announced that it is making it possible for brands to measure the impact of earned media and marketing communications programs, including PR, for the first time ever. With the launch of Cision Impact, a new data-driven solution that enables brands to attribute business value for earned media campaigns, Cision gives marketing the ability to take a holistic and data-driven approach to media investment by applying the same technologies to earned media programs as owned and paid initiatives. Cision Impact builds on the vision of the Cision Communications Cloud , an integrated platform that provides an effective way to identify key influencers, compose and distribute content and then measure its effectiveness.

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The explosive growth of new channels and publishing platforms has fundamentally changed how consumers interact with media, forcing marketers to rethink how they use earned, owned, and paid channels. To successfully manage these changes, marketers have increasingly taken a data-driven approach to media investment. But despite all the progress and innovation, marketers still have a huge billion-dollar blind spot: earned media. Until today, it’s been impossible to measure the actual impact these programs have on revenue with accuracy. With the launch of Cision Impact, Cision is changing this dynamic by applying ad-tech data, link-less tracking measurement, and programmatic approaches to earned media.

“Consumers trust earned media more than owned media/branded sites and paid media, yet brands spend far more money on paid and owned media campaigns because they have not been able to attribute business value to earned media programs,” said Kevin Akeroyd, Cision CEO. “To solve this media paradox and enable brands to take a holistic and data-driven approach to media investment across all channels, we have applied ad-tech data and measurement approaches to earned media. This gives brands the ability to accurately attribute the bottom-line value of earned media investments for the first time.”

Cision Impact includes the following data-driven components:

Cision Impact Reports: A rich set of reports that show true earned media attribution. More specifically, Impact Reports will show true validated reach of the actual number of people who saw the content; engagement data on how the audience interacted with the content; audience data, such as demographics — age, gender, and income and for B2B companies, firmoraphic and bizographic data such as title, industry, and company size; and Conversion Data which will provide actual ROI metrics, such as conversion events on websites that result in leads generated or purchases made.

Cision Audiences: Leveraging Cision’s proprietary tracking technology, the Cision ID, in partnership with an ecosystem of the industry’s leading data and audience management providers, Cision Audiences allows the comms professional to understand exactly who they’re reaching with their campaign. These Cision Audiences can also extend into Paid and Owned channels for integrated messaging and targeting.

“The difficult and complex part of earned media is that the ecosystem is in flux, with an ever-growing list of mediums and channels to reach consumers. Not only is it difficult to understand how to leverage all these channels, but also before Cision Impact, brands were unable to measure the downstream impact of earned media,” Akeroyd noted. “Instead, brands relied on engagement, reach, share of voice, and sentiment metrics that are valuable and good to have, but are not directly tied to business outcomes and do not deliver true attribution. Cision Impact is finally giving communicators the ability to accurately reach their targeted audiences and measure conversions.”